Immortality was not worth the suffering. I would rather be dead than have to face it—again.
It started with a modern myth arising from our belief in the righteousness of science and our understanding of the world based on our technological prowess. The myth stated that if humanity amassed enough knowledge, we could create paradise on Earth by controlling all the elements and events of ordinary life, making the most powerful of gods blush in shame. Better still, such power would confer on us a faculty that humans had dreamed of since the beginning of time—conquering death.
Indeed, one dogma of the myth held that organisms were algorithms and all living systems would answer to mathematical formulas. Therefore, given the right stages of development in biomedical sciences, genetics, gerontology, nanotechnology, informatics, and other fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, immortality would be in our grasp. At some point, someone thought it was already feasible. The concepts were in place, but an essential thing was missing. We needed to establish a scientific method to tackle the problem, and we would need to test it. Well, there was only one way to see if we could make humans immortal, and that would be by making one. Of course, it would take a while to know for sure if we could. My story began there. Ingo Zimmermann, guinea pig, at your service.